Ageing royal fern increases in beauty: Country diary 100 years ago

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 17 November 1916

The bracken is past its best, withered to a dull, uninteresting brown; its crippled stems, stiff and splintering, prick painfully as we wade through the wood where so short a time ago the fronds were breast-high. The ferns vary in autumn beauty according to their kind, some remaining dark green when their tips are curled and dead, grey or almost black; the osmunda, however, rightly named royal, increases in beauty as it ages. It is now a splendid golden orange, a wonderful colour when the sun's rays, somewhat rarely, light it up.

Amongst the beeches the dappled fallow deer, rustling through the leaf-drifts, slowly approach the carriage-drive through the park, but immediately they reach the gravel bound rapidly across. The bucks, full-antlered, call the does, as if urging haste; their voices are a strange mixture of bleat and grunt. These bucks are still excited by recent nuptial contests, but the successful ones have collected and retain their harems. After racing over the road the herd at once slows down to a walk on feeling grass beneath the feet, and the bucks and does alike pass on with a light, elastic gait. It is curious that semi-domestic animals should be so nervous when crossing a man-trodden pathway, for they pay little attention to passers-by when they are feeding a few yards away.